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Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

3.14.by

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Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#21

Post by snvzz »

BarsMonster wrote: post #18
snvzz wrote: post #16

This is TH1520, same SoC as the Lichee Pi 4A. A chip that's oddly faster than JH7110 (VisionFive2, Milk-V Mars) in microbenchmarks, but slower in practice (e.g. gcc). Presumably due to smaller cache. It is also less power efficient, and lacks the upstream support JH7110 enjoys[0]. I would look at Pinetab-V, a tablet-laptop based on that SoC, today. Better yet, wait for Milk-V Oasis[1] tba this June, as well as other…

Damn, best products are always in the future :-) Oasis looks very capable and juicy, looking forward to get my hands on it.

Same. This seems to be the SoC and board I have been waiting a long time for.

Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement.

It should be fun to play with it this summer, and further down the line it will become my home server, replacing an old atom board that's considerably weaker.

That's mostly enabled by the builtin I/O (pcie slots, sata ports...).

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#22

Post by spintin »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #20
drmpeg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very likely that there's a blob for the SDRAM controller. Something like this: https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/master/arch/riscv/dts/...

Also the GPU doesn't have a free driver [currently]

The GPU doesn't have a closed driver that works either.

It's been a year for the JH7110 too, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

On Vision Five 2 everything is still softpipe in the official Debian from Star Five!

On the PineTab-V NOTHING involving the 3D part of the GPU works!

YouTube works for consumption, but that's not interesting for production.

To write/film a review of a SoC with GPU without running glgears is backwards.

I think the only hope now is for the upstream to gain a working driver in a year or two.

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#23

Post by kragen »

BarsMonster wrote: post #17
aappleby wrote: post #4

I have one of these as well - the distro I installed has a broken Chrome that crashes shortly after startup, hopefully that's fixed now. The case is prototype-quality but fine (the fact that it's metal helps a lot), the screen is nice, the keyboard is even more awkward than it needs to be for the size. I've been a bit disappointed by the performance in my tests (compiling various projects of mine with GCC), it seems…

My tests show it's slightly slower than Pi 4 and significantly faster than Pi 3 on CPU performance. 1T Coremark: Pi 3: 3504 Lichee: 6900 Pi 4: 7938

have you tested its rv64v vector performance

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#24

Post by BarsMonster »

kragen wrote: post #23
BarsMonster wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My tests show it's slightly slower than Pi 4 and significantly faster than Pi 3 on CPU performance. 1T Coremark: Pi 3: 3504 Lichee: 6900 Pi 4: 7938

have you tested its rv64v vector performance

Not (yet)

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#25

Post by bpye »

I could get over the perf but the power consumption is rough.

It seems strange that the USB hub is using so much power. From a (leaked?) data sheet I don’t see any way to disable it - but it does have firmware which can be updated? There is also a 5V-3.3V LDO built in so I wonder if that may be what is dissipating so much power.

The AMS1153 looks like a similar story…

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#26

Post by pat64 »

Couple of observations here;

- RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up. - The assertion you can’t buy UMPCs in 2024 is patently false. GPD and a whole host of manufacturers make em. - A non mobile optimised blog in this day and age? That was a chore to read on the go.

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#27

Post by kragen »

BarsMonster wrote: post #24
kragen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tested its rv64v vector performance

Not (yet)

that might be the hotspot of most everyday user interactions: decoding video, compositing windows, scrolling panes, redrawing windows, drawing text glyphs

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#28

Post by rwmj »

schemescape wrote: post #3

> apt update fetches packages from Chinese server So is it not official Debian? If so, that’s concerning!

There's a group as ISCAS who are rebuilding everything in Fedora for unclear reasons (Fedora has a perfectly good effort to build RISC-V packages at http://fedora.riscv.rocks). Not sure if they're also rebuilding Debian too.

Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues

#30

Post by rwmj »

snvzz wrote: post #16

This is TH1520, same SoC as the Lichee Pi 4A. A chip that's oddly faster than JH7110 (VisionFive2, Milk-V Mars) in microbenchmarks, but slower in practice (e.g. gcc). Presumably due to smaller cache. It is also less power efficient, and lacks the upstream support JH7110 enjoys[0]. I would look at Pinetab-V, a tablet-laptop based on that SoC, today. Better yet, wait for Milk-V Oasis[1] tba this June, as well as other…

I did a comparison of a few RISC-V single board computers and the Lichee Pi 4A is definitely very slow on real world tasks, even though in theory it ought to be the fastest. I never got to the bottom of exactly why - it might be software issues or non-upstream drivers. At the moment I'd recommend the VF2 for general use.

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2023/07/25/heads-up-lichee-pi-4a-...

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